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Sabarimala judgment is a test, and Malayalis are flunking it

Supriya Nair

| Nov 25, 2018, 02:00 IST

In the weeks after the Supreme Court’s verdict ordering the Ayyappa temple at Sabarimala to admit women of all ages, many of us have travelled far from our theoretical commitments to constitutionalism and equality.

Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor recently argued that the decision is undemocratic, and that faith must be separated from secular reasoning.

All the intellectual activism in favour of the democratic principle over the constitutional one — to use Tharoor’s distinction — has served to confine the debate to a kind of academic quarrel or political drama. Its combatants are lawyers and party pramukhs. What happens in religious society has gone unexamined as mere emotion.

But it is in this deeply private sphere that both faith and democratic principle have foundered most severely. The fact is that events leading up to the judgment, and the response to it, have tested upper-caste Malayali society, and found it profoundly wanting.

When the judgment was passed, I, like many others, felt instinctively defensive of adherents to Sabarimala’s customs. I come from a very religious family, where the 40-day period of abstinence and ritual that precedes the Sabarimala pilgrimage is deeply meaningful to believers. I understood that such devotees would find it deeply unfair to have to accommodate a stark change in their practices. No one likes having to account for things that they hold dear.

Yet such an accounting is not unwarranted in a republic like India; but in days to come, few seemed willing to submit to it in good faith. In newspapers such as this one, writers split hairs over religious freedom and the role of the courts in Hindu life. Behind this fig leaf of reasoned debate, Malayalis opposing the judgment unleashed a wave of obscurantism, bitterness and unselfconscious snobbery.

We argued that the deity’s celibate character would be offended by the presence of notionally fertile women, but also told each other that such women are wrong to want to go to Sabarimala when they “can go to any other Ayyappa temple” — where the deity, brahmachari as ever, is ready to accept devotions from girls and women.
We argued that menstruation disrupts the purity of the 40-day period of abstinence, obscuring the fact that Sabarimala barred women not only from performing this customary pre-pilgrimage rite, but from any visit to the shrine.

We argued that all religious customs are exclusionary, ignoring that not all of them infringe on the freedoms of the devout. We argued that this was oppression, ignoring that expanding the population of devotees who can access the temple is the opposite of restricting worship (as might be the case if the courts were to place controls on, say, self-harming rituals or severe renunciations).

And let me be honest. We glibly advocated for our “group rights”, even though dominant-caste Malayali men who go to Sabarimala habitually come back seething with resentment at having to share the temple with poor, lower-caste, non-Malayali devotees, whom they see as little more than interlopers.

Arguably, it is the expansion of rights to this demographic, rather than having to share Ayyappa with women of their own social group, that animates elite opposition to the Sabarimala judgment. Happy to complain habitually about the hygiene, the crowds and the priestly mendacity on display at north Indian temples, my uncles now say women shouldn’t go to Sabarimala because it is crowded, dirty and inhospitable to women.

Indeed, the Travancore Devaswom Board has just submitted to the apex court that it cannot guarantee “security” for female devotees. If all this is true, the temple must be unsafe for all devotees — especially the children and senior citizens who are happily admitted to the temple where independent adult women are not.

It is such arguments — there are a few others, and none of better quality — for which advocates such as Tharoor claim the protection of India’s liberal democracy and the pluralism of Hindu belief. Throughout modern Indian history, belief in these principles have allowed dominant social groups, including the Nair caste to which Tharoor and I were born, to exchange our feudal society for a nominally egalitarian one in peace and relative prosperity. We have been the greatest beneficiaries of the new constitutional order, and yet, when a test such as the Sabarimala judgment arrives, we have not simply proven to be its weakest defenders, but its enemies.

We may hope for deliverance through an academic point about our democratically guaranteed freedom to remain inimical. Failing this, we may put our hopes in an opportunist and potentially violent political ploy to assert our majority. But the Supreme Court judgment, in imposing its will on Sabarimala devotees, did not merely issue a diktat. It also asked us a question. We have proved completely unable to answer it.

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